School

A View From the Trenches, by Jacqueline Goldwyn Kingon. “A new teacher recounts her year at a New York City failing school, where clocks never tick, the mantra is ‘cover yourself’ and students teeter on the ledge.”

From the New York Times, free registration required.

Photography

There’s a thread on MetaFilter about colour photographs from the beginning of the 20th century:

The Empire that was Russia – The Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record Recreated. Prokudin-Gorskii took three sepearate photos with a red, green, and blue filter, and the images have been combined so the result is a colour photography. (The whole process is described here.) They are really impressive!
(Here’s a direct link to the image directory. It seems that not all the photos are linked to from the main pages.)

The photos are really impressive, and it adds to their authenticy that the clouds have coloured edges on some photos – showing that they moved between the three shots.

Community

Craig announces that BookNotes is going on hiatus, indefinitely. Wie schade…

Hope to see/read you again soon, Craig!

It’s even worse…

Garret posted two interesting links concerning Channel One. One is The Facts About Channel One, written by Ken McNatt, a sophomore at Oil City High School in Pennsylvania who does “not believe that commercialism in the classrooms of schools is ethical.”

Television

Scott wrote:

“An awful lot of webloggers have admitted to watching ‘Survivor’. Could one of you please explain to Andrea what it is? She says that without a TV of her own, she hasn’t been able to keep up with how low the niveau of modern television has fallen. (Then again, maybe she doesn’t really want to know.)”

For the non-German speakers: He is referring to what I wrote the day before yesterday, when I commented on a new trick that a German TV station has introduced to keep people from zapping to other stations while watching a programme.

I understand it is a sticker that you put on your TV screen while watching certain shows on this TV station. The sticker is sensitive to light, not unlike a photo film, and “records” what you watch. You can then send the sticker to the TV company and win something. If you are interested, the concept for this thing was thought up by tv miles (site in English and German).

To me, this sounds like the perfect big brother scenario, and I find it hard to believe that people are actually participating. But as I read in a Zeit article (in German) that some families wrote to tell the company how much they liked the sticker because they have seen a whole programme for the first time in ages. Now this is really disturbing!

Not only do people watch too much TV, they need a stupid sticker in order to keep them at a show for half an hour. Sad.

Ge ahead and read Amusing ourselves to death by Neil Postman, as Craig suggested.

Okay, back to Survivor. I may not be a TV expert, but at least I know the basic idea behind Survivor. And I’ve gathered from several posts that the winner has been declared a few days ago.

I also know there are similar shows on German TV. I have even watched one episode of the first Big Brother series while visiting my parents. [Gasp!] I had heard so much talk about the series that I had to watch it myself. And I have to admit that I find it unbelievable that people actually watch an hour of this crap every day, plus some extra shows on the weekends. Don’t they have more important or interesting things to do? Or at least more interesting things to watch on TV?

And while I’m ranting about TV, let me add that I find this article (link via Garret) very disturbing: The Phenomenon of Channel One. And although Channel 1 sends advertisement, which is supposed to finance the programme, it still costs tax money. See The Hidden Costs of Channel One. The authors of this article estimate that it costs the taxpayer US$1.8 billion annually, $300 million of which are for the two minutes of commercials they send each day.

Geography

In case you were wondering, it’s 5616 miles or 9038 km from Bonn, Germany, to San Francisco, CA. And Bonn is located at 50:43:12N 7:04:48Em while San Francisco is at 37:47:36N 122:33:17W.

How do I know? I looked it up at this distance calculator that calculates the distance between virtually any two places on earth. Neat little tool!

Around the world…

… by plane and bike is Wade Hatler:

“I’m in the middle of a six month trip involving 45,000km (30,000 miles) of air travel around the world, and around 5,000km (3,000 miles) of bike travel. […]

The total trip consists of two weeks in France, a week in Egypt, a week in Thailand, six weeks in Vietnam, with a 1,000 km (700 mile) bike ride, six weeks in Australia, with about another 1,500 km or so, a couple weeks in New Zealand, [and] Hawaii. […] As currently scheduled, the trip will last form Mid December, 2000 to May, 2001. There’s a pretty good chance that it’ll be longer than that, if I find a place I want to explore more.”.

His trip report is divided into narrative and photo gallery. And by the way, he rides a recumbent bike!

Link shamelessly stolen from André.

Diese Woche in der Zeit

Todesstrafe: Hinrichtung live.

“Es wird ein Schauerspiel mit vielen Bühnen. Am 16. Mai werden 30 Augenzeugen im Bundesgefängnis von Terre Haute in Oklahoma die Hinrichtung des Häftlings 12076-064 beobachten. 259 Menschen verfolgen sein Sterben in einem Saal auf einer Großleinwand. Der Rest des Landes wartet vor dem Fernseher auf ihre Exklusivberichte. Und der Rest der Welt sieht Amerika dabei zu, wie es der Exekution von Timothy McVeigh zusieht.”

Internet: Das Netz für freie Forschung.

“Die NIH, kündigte Varmus an, werden den Aufbau eines elektronischen Zentralarchivs für die Biomedizin unterstützen. “E-Biomed”, ein Projekt von gewaltigen Ausmaßen. Die aktuelle Fachliteratur sollte es umfassen, Hunderttausende von Veröffentlichungen miteinander verknüpfen, auf einem einzigen Server und mit einer einzigen Suchmaschine in null Komma nichts durchforsten. Kosten für den Nutzer: keine. Für jeden Forscher ein Traum. Und für Zeitschriftenverleger ein Albtraum.”

Leben: Lesen und Lesen lassen.

“Sie hetzen durch die Zeitungsspalten, mit der Schere im Kopf und in der Hand: Ohne professionelle Ausschnittdienste käme unsere Mediendemokratie sofort zum Erliegen. Doch jetzt werden die Akkordleser von Scannern bedroht.”

Fernsehen: Dotwin für Deutschland.

“Es geht um fünfmarkstückgroße Pappscheibchen, mit denen der Sender ProSieben seit der vergangenen Woche die Zuschauer an sich binden will. Die Regeln: Man muss bei bestimmten Sendungen (zwei davon stehen täglich zur Auswahl) das Scheibchen auf den Bildschirm pappen, an eine bestimmte Stelle und mit einer bestimmten Ausrichtung. Und dann darf man den Fernseher nicht ausschalten oder das Programm wechseln, bis die Sendung zu Ende ist. Sagt der Sender. Während dieser Zeit wird nämlich der Dotwin “aktiviert”. Anschließend muss der Zuschauer das Scheibchen wieder versiegeln und es einsenden, um an einem Gewinnspiel teilzunehmen.”

Hallo? Geht es denen noch gut? Wer macht denn sowas mit? – Offenbar genug Leute, und manche finden das scheinbar auch noch gut. Am erschreckendsten finde ich dies: “Thomas Hohenacker [Erfinder des Dotwin]: ‘Wir bekommen Rückmeldungen von Familien, die begeistert erzählen, dass sie sich endlich einmal wieder auf eine ganze Sendung eingelassen haben.'”

Ich glaube, es macht sich doch bemerkbar, daß wir keinen Fernseher haben. Ich bin überhaupt nicht auf dem Laufenden, wie niedrig das Niveau des Fernsehens schon ist. Ich wußte nicht, daß Big Brother noch immer läuft, und ich wußte nicht, daß die Fernsehsender jetzt auch Big Brother spielen und kontrollieren, was man sieht. Und erst recht hätte ich nicht damit gerechnet, daß die Zuschauer das auch noch begeistert mitmachen.

Ich kann mich Craig nur anschließen und jedem wärmstens empfehlen, Wir amüsieren uns zu Tode (Amusing ourselves to death) von Neil Postman zu lesen.

Summer!

Ah, we had a wonderful warm and sunny day today. I spent the afternoon lying in the garden, reading Amusing ourselves to death by Neil Postman. It takes a while to read it because I take notes since the book is on the must-read-list for my exams.

Meanwhile, I have decided that the National Geographic’s Guide ot the National Parks of the United States is what I want. Thanks to Jim Stegman for recommending it!

Also, I think I might want to have a look at the National Geographic’s Guide to the State Parks, a book about the 200 best state parks from all 50 states.

Beauty on the web

I received some very nice emails from Ciara, who pointed me to AfriCam, the world’s first virtual game reserve! In Ciara’s opinion, it’s the world’s best webcam, and I would like to agree with her… Her description sounds pretty impressive, but unfortunately my browser (IE 5 on MacOS 9) freezes every time I click on a link at AfriCam. There seems to be a problem with JavaScript.

By the way, there seem to be more interesting sites on Ciara’s Áilleacht (which is Irish for Beauty).

I especially like Mysterious Places. See the Hidden Canyons.

Whoa, and look at the Buckskin Gulch Virtual Tour. Amazing! I think these are some of the best photos I’ve ever seen on the web.

More nice photos can be found at California Pictures.

Thanks for sharing these beautiful sites with us, Ciara!